This piece first appeared in German. The English version is a rewrite rather than a line-by-line translation, and the answers below are translated: the substance is unchanged, the wording is not the speaker's own. The German original stays online in the archive: Interview: Praktikum im Investment Banking.

A research task in investment banking is rarely five companies. Tom Buchholz spent much of his internship at a global investment bank writing short descriptions of several hundred of them, collecting contact details and checking each one against a profile.

That is the work AI reached first, and he is unusually relaxed about it. What follows is a conversation about what an internship actually consists of, which parts of it a model now does, and what he thinks juniors should be able to do instead.

All answers are Tom Buchholz's personal views and are not an official statement by his employer.

Speed is the skill nobody teaches you

What does the typical skillset of an investment banking intern look like?

You need to be fast in PowerPoint and Excel, and that means shortcuts. It sounds trivial and it is not. If you are not using keyboard shortcuts, people look at you funny. Speed and efficiency count. There is almost no classical training in the sense of a course or an onboarding program, so you learn by watching, by getting feedback, and by doing.

Did you teach yourself those programs beforehand?

I had a few basics, but you pick up most of it on the job very quickly. You spend so much time in those tools that you get better automatically.

Which tasks did you take on during the internship?

At the start you mostly get research work, regardless of how good you are. You look up companies, write short descriptions, collect contact details and check whether the firms fit the profile. Not for five companies. Sometimes for several hundred.

Later you get to work on deals: building PowerPoint slides, preparing financial models in Excel, reworking presentations. The associates usually take the more demanding modeling, while interns and analysts provide the support. Everything gets revised several times over until it is ready to pitch.

Which tools dominate the day?

Excel and PowerPoint, clearly. Those are every investment banker's babies, and that hardly changes later on. Associates still work with the same tools, the focus just shifts. The higher you go, the more it becomes about communication and client contact.

Research and drafting are where AI already sits

Where is AI currently used in investment banking?

Mostly in research and in drafting text. Almost nothing runs without it anymore. A lot of banks use tools to rework text or to summarize market trends faster. But you always have to double-check, especially with numbers, because AI can pull from faulty or unreliable sources. The genuinely decisive tasks, valuations or important analyses, have to be done by people. You carry the responsibility for them.

Has AI changed how you work on the classic tasks, so research, pitchbooks, models?

Definitely. In research it saves an enormous amount of time, because it can search a lot of sources in parallel. You get information in seconds that used to take hours. The important points you still have to check yourself. With writing it helps too, rephrasing text and making it more precise, which saves a lot of time. In the end you can concentrate more on the content that actually matters.

The repetitive work goes, the headcount does not

What opportunities and risks do you see for people starting out, as AI takes over more tasks?

I see it more as an opportunity. The annoying, repetitive tasks fall away and you can concentrate on what counts. Anyone can spend hours looking at websites, and that is not what makes the difference in the end. I do not think it means fewer interns get hired. There is always plenty to do anyway. And AI is not yet at the point where it could reliably replace an entire PowerPoint deck or a financial model.

Which skills will matter more for people entering the field?

Alongside the classic skills you have to be good at working with AI. That means writing good prompts and reading the results correctly. If you know exactly how to phrase a question, you get better and faster answers. At the same time you have to be able to reflect, so to judge when the model is right and when you need to check it yourself.

Eighty hours, and the team is what makes it survivable

What advice would you give students who want an investment banking internship?

Know what you are signing up for. Social media glorifies investment banking, the money, the career, the lifestyle. The reality is eighty-hour weeks, mostly in the office, with little sleep and hardly any free time.

What helps is teamwork. If you finish your tasks early, help the others. That way everyone gets out earlier and it strengthens the group. Communication is decisive.

What did you take away from your time in investment banking?

I learned to value time. When you work late every day, you notice how valuable free time is. And on AI, you use it daily, but you mostly learn through experience. The more you apply it, the better you understand how to use it properly. There is no course for that. You have to learn it yourself.

What this adds up to

The internship stays demanding, and the growing use of AI has not softened it. What has moved is which part of the work a beginner is judged on. Excel and PowerPoint still have to be there. On top of them sits the ability to work with a model and to know when its answer needs checking.

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